For pineapple twisters, solidarity forever
I am back, in harness at the office, and deep into my own preparations for Labor Day, which include taking the day off. Meanwhile, a tale to enhance your Labor Day mood:
Steven Short (of “Crosscurrents” on KALW) was at Trader Joe’s in Stonestown Galleria the other day, picked up a pineapple and stepped up to the checkout clerk to pay for it. “Did he want the top removed?” the clerk asked. “Yes,” he said, upon which, he described, she “gave it an expert twist.” Instead of throwing the top away, however, she set it aside. When he asked why, she explained that when she and another clerk worked together, she would often stash a pineapple top in her co-worker’s drawer, as a joke. That clerk moved to another TJ’s, so “now I just take a picture and send it to him. I miss him.”
In response to criticism about the appropriateness of her shoes, Footwear News reports that the stiletto pumps worn by Melania Trump as she embarked on her tour of the Hurricane Harvey disaster area were $595 Manolo Blahniks, and that the designer himself had described them as a “good shoe for every occasion.”
After months of negotiations, it’s been announced that “Dream of the Red Chamber,” the opera by Bright Sheng and David Henry Hwang that premiered at the San Francisco Opera House last September, will play six performances in China beginning next Friday, Sept. 8. The opera, to be conducted for the first time by its composer, Sheng, will be performed in Beijing, Changsha and Wuhan. San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee and a group of supporters from San Francisco will attend the opening performance.
Music man Mike Greensill, who is husband/arranger/accompanist for Wesla Whitfield, has sent out a “sad letter” (his description) announcing the singer’s retirement. She’s been dealing with a bad infection, according to the letter, and prescribed drugs “are playing havoc with her voice and throat. She’s just not happy with her ability to sing up to her standards, so she has decided reluctantly, that it’s time to hang it all up.”
Whitfield, who turned to cabaret singing after a 1977 robbery shooting left her using a wheelchair, came to the attention of Bay Area cabaret fans a few years later. In 1985, The Chronicle’s Gerald Nachman wrote that he’d been marveling at her for five years, and called her “the most remarkable singer in the city ... spinning out song after song with all the romantic, satiric and bittersweet nuances neatly in place . ... If songs could write on cocktail napkins, they’d all request her.”
Greensill’s letter also said that he and his band, Mike Greensill Big 5, will perform as planned, at an Old First Concert in the Old First Church in San Francisco at 4 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 3.
As to vacation, we walked on the boardwalk at Asbury Park, N.J., but not in the sand, because it costs $7 for a day on the beach at the Jersey shore. Another guest at the wedding we attended said she’d sneaked onto the beach, but when approached by officers patrolling she told them she (1) wouldn’t put a towel down on the sand; (2) would refrain from dipping so much as a toe into the ocean.
In Brooklyn buying a subway ticket, we heard another patron ask a station agent how to get to a destination, then explode with anger when the clerk said he didn’t know. Stopping into a sewing store, we heard a woman get into a screaming match with the proprietor when he refused to give advice and told her she’d have to decide herself on the proper buttons for a man’s suit. Passing a quartet of men, obviously old friends, sitting on wooden crates playing dominoes one late evening, we heard a sudden outburst of indignant yells punctuated with “You messed up big time!” (only “messed” wasn’t the word he used).
We ate ice cream on the street; we had dinner one night in a restaurant where Ethan Hawke came in and sat at the next table and everyone tried not to notice; and we chowed down with family in a New Jersey diner with a 20-or-so-page menu that might have been written by Marcel Proust and included the option of sugar-free fake maple syrup, a menu choice with which Proust was probably unfamiliar.
It was New York in August, and we had a lovely time.